by Jim Lindberg
THE GLAMOUROUS LIFE OF A WARPED TOUR VETERAN
“My daughter Violet slept with my wife and me until she was two years old, mainly because it made breastfeeding easier. She pretty much goes for it all day until she passes out. It’s chaos. Touring is not all that different. You don’t sleep, you get thrown up on, people throw bottles at your face, sometimes you shit or piss in your pants, and you’re drunk every night. It’s fun.”
—Joey Cape, Lagwagon
After the first few months, we had settled into a routine with daughter number one and it was time for me to be back out on the road to play the Vans Warped Tour and deal with my own version of morning sickness. The Warped Tour covers about fifty cities in about fifty-five days, which means about three days off in two months and traveling from L.A. to Vancouver to Boise to Detroit, San Antonio, Virginia Beach, Rykers Island, and every stifling hot city in between. There are about a hundred bands of old school and new school punk, emo, screamo, hardcore, thrash, metal, rap, DJs, and shit that can’t be qualified into any category, all on half a dozen stages along with hundreds of merch booths, food stands, skate ramps, climbing walls, and moto jumps, and if you’re a skate punk kid with tattoos and body piercings it’s a wet dream.
When we were out surviving the Warped Tour, every other day or so I’d call my wife and ask her how the baby was doing and she’d tell me that she was fine but that they had a doctor checkup that day and when they stripped the baby down and put her on the scale to weigh her, she produced a loud stream of flatulence and filled her diaper right in front of the doctor and to a person somewhat socially shy like my wife this was catastrophically embarrassing, and when she’s catastrophically embarrassed, she tends to start giggling uncontrollably and can’t stop and begins turning red, which is what happened and the doctor probably thought she was mental. Otherwise she was okay and so she asks me how the tour is going.
A typical day on the Warped Tour goes something like this. You wake up in your bunk around noon and you’re sweating like a pig because the air-conditioning went off on your side of the bus and your face has five thousand lines engraved in it because you had to use someone’s pants for a pillow last night because someone stole yours. You immediately stumble out of your bunk because the combined smell of the feet, farts, and jock fungus of twelve guys who have been eating nothing but barbecue for the last five weeks has been mixing in the poorly ventilated sleeping area, and now the rancid air you’ve been inhaling all night finally registers with your olfactory senses and you throw up in your mouth a little at the stench of it. You look out the window and have no idea where you are because all you see are other buses sandwiched in as close as possible on all sides. You surmise that you must be in a stadium parking lot somewhere in Cleveland, but it might as well be Detroit, or Chicago, or Milwaukee, because all these places are starting to look the same, but one thing’s for sure, you know that you need to find some coffee and a bathroom, but not necessarily in that particular order.
You can hear that there are no less than five bands playing at the same time on several stages surrounding you, because the throbbing of the bass and kick drum has just reminded you that you drank way too much last night, because what the hell else is there to do but drink way too much when you’re on a traveling music festival with fifty other bands and crew? So every night someone has a barbecue and you start with a few beers in between chicken wings and cheeseburgers and then there’s Bloody Marys on somebody’s bus and maybe someone’s opened a bottle of red wine, or worse, Jameson’s, and the next thing you know you’re shit faced, and why not, because how in the world could you be sober in an extreme action sports and music, testosterone-fueled traveling circus festival and retain any shred of sanity?
So here it is the next day and you’re hung over again and you step off the bus into daylight and it’s well over a hundred degrees outside because why wouldn’t it be? You’re in a stadium parking lot, in the middle of some U.S. city downtown, in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer, so of course it’s hot, hotter than any human should be forced to endure for more than ten or twenty seconds before darting back into an air-conditioned room, but all you can think about is that at some point during the day, instead of sitting in an air-conditioned room like most people should be doing on a 100-degree day, you are going to get up on a stage in front of about fifteen thousand equally hot and sweaty young people and spaz out as much as you possibly can for forty minutes until you start seeing double and begin to hallucinate.
Right now, however, you need to find a bathroom and since you can’t go number two on the bus you have to find a Port-a-Potty, but there is none in sight so you go around and meet other band members and crew, who, like you, look and smell horrible, and they are also walking funny and looking around with one eye open, squinting against the harsh noonday sun, and then a straight edge tour manager finally points you in the right direction and you find the one open Port-a-Potty and you are so happy and you go in the door and it plasticly slams behind you. It’s pitch-black dark, and it’s at least twenty degrees hotter in there than it is outside, and then that’s when it hits you, the smell. The smell is there. Your eyes haven’t adjusted but the smell is already making you see colors. It has shape. It is a monster. It hits you in the solar plexus and takes your breath away, not that you’d want to breathe anyway, because your lungs would literally roll up in protest like one of those kids’ birthday party blowers. You do what you have to do, but you’re getting dizzy now, and starting to lose consciousness from lack of air, and then, darkness envelops you.
You stumble out of the wretched chamber and gasp in as many large gulps of fresh air as you can force into your lungs. The rest of the day is spent hanging out with hundreds of other band and crew guys who all look exactly alike because we all dress the same, like mutant postapocalyptic gas station attendants with wallet chains, tattoos, and baseball hats, and so, of course, when you say, “What’s up?” to each other you can’t remember their names and they think you’re a stuck-up asshole when in reality you’re just getting old and senile from too many beers and barbecues and music pounding into your head all day and so then you start walking around checking out other bands you’ve seen play so many times already you know exactly what they are going to say in between songs before they even know it themselves, and it’s going to be things like, “How’s everybody doing? Hey, Warped Tour, you guys having a good time? Let’s hear some noise! What’s up, Chicago!?! We want to see you guys go off to this one! This is off our new album! Are you guys having a good time?”
Finally it’s time to play the show, and you argue with your band members about what songs you are going to play and you see Big Mitch, the head of security, and you say, “It’s hot,” and he says, “Yep, it’s fucking hot,” and then you go on stage and the crowd roars and you sweat and strain and freak out and forget the words to the fourth song and then you get hit in the head with a shoe and you scream at the crowd about this fucked-up world we live in, the perfect people looking down on you, and corrupt governments, greedy corporations, and hypocritical religious fanatics trying to rip off and exploit the working class and you generally have a great time rallying against the futility of it all and you stage dive and the crowd goes nuts and everyone’s feeling good and you play your last song and come off the stage feeling drained and exhausted and soaking wet with sweat and you collapse somewhere and before you know it someone will be firing up the barbecue and handing you a beer and you’ll be ready to do it all over again.
You come home after a month and a half of doing this day after day and your liver will be shot, you’ll have a scorching case of athlete’s foot, your brain will feel like a soggy sponge, and you will absolutely detest every pore and skin particle of your band members and crew, but at the same time you love every one of them like a brother with whom you survived a plane crash in the Himalayas, and you’ll wonder how you possibly made it through without having a catastrophic mental and emotional breakdown.
PUNK ROCK ERRAND BOY
Since my wife had the breastfeeding boobs and stayed home and did most of the work with the baby while I was on tour, my job when I was home usually became running errands and picking up groceries and baby supplies and the prescriptions she’d need filled when the little germ receptacles would get a cold, fever, or become constipated. Jennifer takes perverse pleasure in sending me to the store to get the items that cause most men extreme embarrassment to bring to the check-out counter. There is nipple cream; breast pads; maxi, mini, and supermaxi pads with wings; and all kinds of other strange apparatus she needs me to buy and take the heat for at the cash register. Also, for some reason, many of the products the kids require are anally related, from anal suppositories and rectal thermometers to all varieties of diaper rash powders and ointments, which are equally embarrassing to inquire about.
Once I was sent on a mission to the nearest Drug Emporium to retrieve all kinds of ointments, salves, and snake oils when the baby had a fever. Once again I was given a list by my wife of intricate detail of the exact brand she wanted, with product specifications and age requirements for each item, because obviously I am not to be trusted to know the difference between Tylenol for Kids, Advil Sinus Jr., Pediatric Liquid Ibuprofen, and St. Joseph’s Baby Aspirin Horse Tranquilizers for Toddlers between ages two and five that are stacked up six shelves high on the baby aisle. These are all child versions of the adult products, and you know this because the kid version has a picture of a purple dinosaur or a friendly giraffe right next to the warning sign that says if you give so much as one milligram more than the recommended amount to your infant, you’ll send them into epileptic shock. In the aisle with you there will be about four other dads with bed head who’ll be looking at their lists and scanning the football field-long aisle of baby medicine with a “What the fuck?” look on their face just like yours.
So after literally an hour of searching to find the exact right kind of medicines, I go over to the men’s aisle to acquire the phalanx of toiletries a middle-aged punk rock dad needs to fool his teenage fans into thinking he’s closer to their age than their old man’s. I throw my booty into the cart, thinking I’m probably going to have to take out a second mortgage to pay for all the products I need to keep my baby healthy and let me pretend I’m twenty a little longer.
I bring everything up to the register and empty it all out and notice the guy working is an eighteen-year-old-looking dude with sideburns, dyed black hair, hand tattoos, and an eyebrow ring, the exact Pennywise demographic. Because I am the epitome of the local celebrity, I’m hardly ever recognized in public, mainly due to the fact that our band has never risen above cult status, the apex of our career being when we were featured on Access Hollywood because Pat O’Brien’s twelve-year-old kid was a fan, but also because I’m completely indistinguishable from the millions of other goateed, baseball cap-wearing surf-skate/action sports/extreme this and that punk guys driving next to you on the freeway in a 4x4 with multiple large motocross decals on the tinted back window. Very often I’ll see someone staring at me and think I’m being recognized and act all cool like I’m being hounded for autographs, but instead they just think I’m their buddy Steve. If this checkout guy does recognize me, he’d have to be a hardcore fan to be able to distinguish me from any of the other five hundred extreme action sports guys who walk through his aisle every day.
“Hey, aren’t you the guy from Pennywise?”
At the same time I get a shot of adrenaline from the ego boost, I think about what’s on the conveyor belt in front of me.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Dude, I used to listen to you guys when I was a kid.”
“What, when you were two?”
He starts saying “rad” a lot, like I do, and wants me to sign something for him, and then says his friend Paul loves us and he won’t believe this, and asks another few questions before he remembers he’s actually working and starts to scan my items through. With each item, he and I are both let down further and further. Children’s anal suppository. Child rectal thermometer. Diaper rash cream. Breast pads. Just for Men Extra Gray Coverage Brown Hair Dye. Metamucil. Nair for Men. Mylanta. With each swipe across the scanner I go from being punk rock, superstar, Warped Tour legend, to rapidly aging, grayhaired father of a constipated child, with a nipple-dripping wife. I’m not a radical, punk-scene voice of a generation, I’m a pathetic middle-aged loser having problems with heartburn, irregularity, and back hair.
“That’ll be $95.10.”
I hand him the cash and sulk away. I envision him tossing out the paper he had me sign and the band losing one more unit of sales all because the checkout guy saw me at my weakest moment.
This is all part of the game of being a parent. When I signed up to be a dad I had to leave my cool and my self-respect at the maternity room doors. On our white minivan we have no less than three life-size decals of Britney Spears’s face stuck to the windows. A friend saw me driving the wife and kids in it and said he was going to the record store to trade in all his Pennywise records. I told him to get me the new Christina Aguilera while he was there because the kids were begging me for it.
4
MOMMY’S LITTLE MONSTER
Kids figure out at an early age what’s cool and what sucks. Chocolate, candy, gum, TV, toys, games, and bikes are cool; flu shots, vegetables, taking medicine, and going to the dentist suck. They like to play dress up and put on thousands of different costumes in a given day, but they hate putting on real clothes to go out to dinner or wearing a jacket when it’s cold. My girls will put pajamas on their dolly and brush dolly’s teeth and comb dolly’s hair and put dolly into her little dolly bunk bed, but just try getting them to do it for themselves in less than five hours without having to threaten to cancel all their play dates for a year, it won’t happen.
Our kids always became very strong-willed and independent at an age we were never really prepared for. It amazes me how a person an eighth of my size can dictate what, when, and how I do things and basically control my entire life. They become so defiant to your will you’ll wonder if you’ll ever be able to get them to do anything they don’t want to do. She doesn’t want the bowl of cereal you just poured for her, she wants waffles. He wants to wear the blue shirt with the Superman sign, not the red striped one with the football. No, she won’t take the cough medicine you drove through the rain to get for her, it tastes yucky. He doesn’t want to go to school, he wants to stay home and eat ice cream and watch cartoons all day.
Deep inside, we are proud of this independent spirit. It should remind us of when we were little punks and wanted to stand up to the man and do things our own way. But that all flies out the window when you’re late for a doctor’s appointment and the four-year-old won’t get in the car or put on pants and is now streaking down the sidewalk bottomless. An independent spirit is great as a concept, but not as good when your kid is running around your neighborhood without pants on.
Almost exactly to the day when my kids had their second birthdays, they started acting different. They verbalize their requests, so instead of just crying to get what they want, they have this crying/ talking/moaning thing they do called whining. Whining operates at a decibel level that is so annoying to a man’s eardrum follicles that he’ll immediately do anything to get it to stop, throwing all advice to the contrary out the window. Our children figured this out early on and would employ the whining tactic to get anything from chocolate milk and French fries for breakfast to whatever overpriced toy they wanted at the toy store. I’m still amazed when I’m sitting next to my kid at midnight on the couch watching TV because they whined so convincingly to “please let me stay for five more minutes, pleeeeease!” (While I’m writing this, m
y two-year-old has been coming in and out of the room with different nude Barbie dolls, whining, crying, and demanding that I somehow fit the stretch pants made for the tiny Polly Pocket doll onto Cinderella Barbie, who is a good three inches taller, and she cries huge heavy tears when I can’t get them to fit. From my friends with boys, I hear they’re just as bad, if not worse.)
Daughter number three has just recently learned she has the power to use the word “No.” “No,” she doesn’t want to take a bath, “No,” she doesn’t want lunch, “No,” she won’t brush her teeth, and “No,” she doesn’t want to be a good girl and please do what Daddy says before he has a nervous breakdown. She’s also perfected the art of the Oscar Award–winning tantrum, with requisite back arch, air kicks, breath holding while screaming at the same time, and turning colors. With whining, tantrums, and “no,” I found myself in all kinds of embarrassing situations where I had to either cave in and give them what they wanted, or curl up in a ball and cry. These years are known as the Terrible Twos, and they usually last well into high school.
Although if I’d have to choose a great time to be both a parent and a kid, it’s the toddler years. They can be the most challenging times, but they’re also the most fun. Toddlers have all their emotions right there on the surface. They haven’t learned yet to be fake and subvert what they really think and feel in life. They let everyone in the room know emphatically what they want, what they’re scared of, and when they have to go number two. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just walk into your boss’s office and whine that you really want a big raise and then throw yourself on the carpet, hold your breath, and arch your back if he doesn’t give you one? At a company luncheon, during a speech, you could just grab your pee-pee and do a little dance and everyone would know you had to go to the bathroom. Later on, we slowly learn that to function in society we need to suppress and hide our darkest fears and deepest desires, which makes sense, I guess, because you wouldn’t want to tell your best friend that deep inside you’re scared to death of growing old and dying and that you would really love to have sex with his wife. When you’re a kid, you tell it like it is and never spare the details.